Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Theories !!

Theory I : "The ambition opportunity paradox"

Written in response to a friend's question on "Who are these new TMC voters? Can't they see what's happened over last 3 years in WB?".

As context, in WB, TMC has increased their votes by 17.65 lacs in 2014 LS elections vis-a-vis 2011 Assembly elections, while LF's vote has decreased by 36.18 lacs and BJP's vote has increased by 67.57 lacs. !!!

WB economy is still largely dependent on agriculture. It remains
biggest producer of rice and vegetables in the country. Industrialisation is
primarily a mirage. The basic issue there is, WB is so densely populated its not
possible to build large scale industry without displacing rural population from
their multi-crop land.

The burgeoning population and corresponding increase in young voters need an
economic outlet. They are not per se interested in agriculture and they are
heavily exposed to media which sells them dollar dreams and reality shows. So
what can they aspire to be? Most of them invariably leave the State to find jobs outside (notice how many restaurants employ bong waiters?).
The ones who are left are invariably caught in the vicious circle of land
deals, brokerage, middlemen, promotership, real estate, low level govt jobs
including teaching and get rich quick schemes like Sharada. For all these you
need political patronage. Left had successfully made this a base of their
political cadre-ship through what I call "paiye deoar rajneeti". So if
you are seen as a active party worker you would gain an unfair advantage in all
these areas. In effect, party politics had become your primary occupation without any
sort of ideological attachment. Same thing is continuing in a bigger scale with
TMC. Only the colour has changed. And the veneer of ideology is also gone
as TMC is a party run by people who have risen only through vicious
manipulation of the system and voter psyche and they do not care about ideology
at all. Their only job is to hold on to power and to manipulate it to gain more
power. And this work only through populism and more populism (grant to Sharada affected, bribes to
mullahs, pandering to matuas etc.) without any long-term development.

You can say Left has got cleansed as a result. The people who were there
only to get economic mileage are now all with TMC. The question is how long
they can hold on to even their existing cadre without a prospect of any economic
gain. And how to get WB out of this self-defeating political quagmire?

The most telling comment on above amateurish analysis came from another friend. According to him, our current CM has successfully imported the rest of India's caste / community / glamour based politics to WB in order to upstage and uproot Left's "outdated and increasingly irrelevant thought processes" (at least perception wise). BJP is a better player in the same game as the national result shows and this is going to hurt her in future.

Theory II : "I want it NOW"

We have all started suffering from attention deficit disorder to some extent. Call it the
curse of the mobile generation / continuous social media immersion. instant gratification is the name of the game. For example, just notice
how long you can stick to one channel on TV or how many pages you can read in a
book at one stretch. I would think both of these have drastically reduced
from our past.

Well, the politicians will suffer big-time as a result of our reduced attention spans. We
as voters / citizens want something (most of the time not knowing what that
something is) and we want it NOW.

I predict non-fanatic Modi supporters getting bored with his perceived inaction in
less than a month.

3 comments:

Good one Roshmi...Even I feel that time has already started ticking for TMC in Bengal, what with Saradha and JU. Just stumbled upon this blog and figured that it is you who is writing. Good to be back in touch. Hopefully we can talk sometime - Sujoy